Build - Tony Fadell

April 13,2023

last update: 2024-11-19

Tony Fadell Writes about his lessons from his enrepreneurial and leadership role, shipping multiple successful products. A great book teaching about how companies, leaders and employees think

Build Yourself

• “The only failure in your twenties is inaction. Rest is trial and error”
• In the early days of a career it is better to optimise for what one is naturally good at, instead of optimising for money, status or title. Because only what we are naturally interested about, would push us in direction where there is value to unlock/
• Early stage career is unique in that There are a lot of windows open, and they start closing once we reach late 30 - 40s.
• Find Heroes and follow your curiosity and try helping people. Instead of just trying to get help from big people, it is better to offer help to them.
• Big companies are good to understand about ideas and structures that are long ranging. Not having to survive tomorrow, puts them in a different scale of survival.
• Don’t only look down at the roadmap. Because, knowing what you want built is more important than building the thing itself. On the flipside it is also important know when to put be heads down and building Not doing either would be difficult. Fadell’s story from General magic about how the team was totally detached from the end customer, made their product dead on arrival.
• I liked this chapter because it speaks a lot about how having to work hard early is important and why having divergent thoughts than everybody around might not be such a bad thing.

Build your career

• Tony knew when he had to split from general magic when the vision did not align and no way forward was to be found. He joined Panasonic as a 25-year-old CTO.
• Trying to build a new and exciting product within a big behemoth is still worth it.
• Managing people is drastically different than, being an individual contributor.
  • Exacting work is not micromanagement
  • Being honest is more important than style
  • Don’t be afraid for your team to shine more than you.
• Team lead is kind of a mid-point between IC and manager. And might be optimal for a lot of people.
• Being honest is hard because in most cases, we are stuck being sugar coated. It is important to let a team member know their honest result.
• Data versus Opinion, Being data driven is important. But, one should acknowledge the biases of data collection and impossibility of data collection in a lot of cases, eg. iphone/ipod had no predecessors'.
• There are people who build and get work done. And then there are people, who try to make the doers look bad. These are people who take advantage of situations and try to pull down and love playing politics. Being able to manage them is a big part of working in an organisation.
• When dealing with assholes having open and transport communication channels between others is important as the assholes will try to play out of that communication gap. Making sure there are people you can trust is important as well
• Knowing when to quit is very important. When General Magic was devoid of any touch to reality, Tony quit to build the thing that mattered. Trusting your instinct and doing the right work is more important than doing work you don’t believe in.

Build the Product

• Products are intangible when they are just ideas, and as humans, we focus on tangible things and ignore the intangible. Before building prototype everything so that the intangible is as tangible as possible. Being able to map and visualise the product is an important part.
• Building and delivering the Product is just one part of the customer journey. the customer journey start from when they are aware of your product to how they perceive it, till they use it constantly and are delighted by it. Product is one piece of the puzzle, one has to get the whole pipeline correct to nail the customer experience. Tony’s experience with nest adding a screw is very interesting.
• Storytelling is an important part because, it appeals to the rational and emotional side of people. and simplifies the complicated concept. It lets people understand the why of the problem.
• There is a clear distinction between Evolution, Disruption and Execution.
  • Evolution is making something preexisting, better.
  • Disruption is when something fundamentally new is changing the status quo. Usually by taking a novel approach to old problems
  • Execution is getting done what was already promised.
• the advantage of disruptive product is that, others can’t replicate the same thing for a while and the barrier of entry has been raised up.

Build the product

• Basic elements of an idea.
  • It solves the why. “What” comes after the “why” is figured out.
  • A lot of people have that problem.
  • The difficulty of building the product won’t matter because the problem is following around everywhere.
• Good ideas of painKillers and not vitamins.
• Figuring out whether you are ready to build a company is a leap of faith. There are obviously a lot of things we are missing.
• Failing is part of the process and figuring things out is very important.
• Raising capital is getting into a marriage. You wouldn’t want to get into a marriage just for the money, same with VC. There are VCs who would promise the world and do nothing and just hang you out to dry.
• VCs having competing priorities just like anybody and are mostly trying to cover their quota for that quarter. There are all kinds of VCs in the game, greedy ones who use a bad time to leveragea better deal out of you, VCs who only invest for an outsized part of your company.
• No matter what the business model, people can only have one customer that they are dedicated to, irrespective of whether you’re a marketplace are a D2C company. You can either be a great company to your consumers or your suppliers.
• The Utopia, is when every aspect of life is perfectly balanced. But, most times that is not the case and we take our work with us to our homes, it is important to know when to let go and not over work to death.
• When a crisis occurs, it is very important to know and understand that focus should be on fixing the problem. Getting help from mentors and peers is important. Irrespective of who’s mistake it was, taking responsibility and getting everything straightened out should take the front seat.
• Tony’s story on how they handled the “fire-waving” crisis at nest was very interesting. In times of crisis, it should be all hands on deck and complete transparency. And every should start contributing their share to solve the problem at hand. In a similar vein, Andy groves story on how they handled the float-miscalculation issue at intel also had similar ideas.

Build Your Team

• The key to the success of companies is entirely dependent on the people. The people make the company even before the company was even a company. The early team, would be singularly focusing on delivering the best work and making the product a reality.
• Investing on teaching interns and new hires is important as it cultures and ensures that there are people to take care of the future of the company.
• Interviews should be conducted by people who would work directly with the person.
• When hiring it is not just a person we are inviting to our company. We are taking part in their lives, which means making sure they are well taken care of. This also means that hiring should not be taken lightly and only growing at the rate that it is required at.
• Hiring should be the first topic of all meetings. This gives the signal that hiring great people is the top priority and is very much required.
• While interviewing, As much important as it is to be respectful and supporting. It is important to stress test the individual and whether they have an attitude where they focuse on figuring out. also see “little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept” .
• Breakpoints are important to notice. Communication style used for 15 people doesn’t work with 100 people. Which means everything has to be re-architected.
• The critical number is usually 120 when it is noticable to see the productivity drop and then try to figure out how to keep everyone informed while also, not barraging everyone with meetings.
• It’s very similar to how an organism starts. It starts as a single cell and then becomes 2 and then as it matures, its individual units should specialize, while also making sure every part is able to communicate with the others.
• There are a lot more detailed stuff in the book, that are better read by reading the chapter 5.2.
• Designing the system is critical and that can only be done with a deep understanding of the pain points of the customer. Beware of habituation, it makes us not see things that can be improved and made better.
• “Design is not just a profession”
• “Customer is not only a person who buys something”.
• “A product is not just a physical object or software that you sell”
• Creating the whole process from the first time, the customer hears the name of the product/brand, buys the product, and uses is a journey that has to be handled delicately and with much forethought. Every step in that pipeline should be questioned, why? what? and how?

Other parts of the book are equally informative, but I’m stopping here. As, I would be kidding myself if I understood those deep enough.